Homily: Harvest Sunday/The Twenty-Second Sunday after Pentecost [November 13, 2011] Christ Church Cranbrook

Last weekend Kathy and I had houseguests and took them, among other places, to the Franklin Cider Mill. I had not been there since the days, in the early 1980s, when I would make regular runs to get cider and donuts for the Marquis Club teenagers. In the intervening years, I had forgotten about the majesty of the cider press there. Last Saturday I must have spent a half hour simply watching that enormous machine bear down on the apples and produce an unimaginable amount of fruity liquid in the process.

Watching a real cider press in action caused me to remember a line from John Keats’s great ode, “To Autumn”. The poem personifies the season, picturing her presiding over the abundance of the harvest. It’s full of beautiful images of fullness, ripeness, and plenitude. As I stood there watching the Franklin Mill cider press do its work, the lines that dimly came to mind were the ones that show Autumn sitting by a cider press “with patient look,” watching “the last oozing hours by hours”.

Naturally the day, the scene, the remembered lines from Keats, and my general lack of sales resistance meant that I went home with a couple of bags of honeycrisp apples and a several gallons of cider. If you’re an English teacher, or a former English teacher, there is no greater pleasure than enjoying a beverage celebrated in a poem you love in the comfort of your own home. Luckily for all of us, it’s good that the poem I remembered that day wasn’t “The Face on the Barroom Floor”.

Watching the Franklin Mill cider press set me to thinking about the season of harvest and how—even though most of us are disconnected from the rhythms of agriculture—it might still have something powerfully true to tell us about our lives. When John Keats pictures Autumn sitting with patient look by the cider press watching “the last oozing hours by hours”, he is suggesting that the processes of harvest might be symbolic; they might stand for themselves and for something else. Making cider is a human activity. But like all human activities, it is grounded in something beyond itself. Human beings make cider, but we make it from apples; and we don’t make or control the apples. The apples come from someplace else. Cider is a human production, but its manufacture is dependent on a divine gift. If you don’t have apples, you can’t make cider.

So cider is a human artifact made from a divine gift. The poet Wallace Stevens, a more knowledgeable Keats fan than I, once said, “The real is only the base. But it is the base.” [Wallace Stevens, Opus Posthumus, p. 160] Like Keats, Stevens was a poet who celebrated the power of the imagination. Like all great artists, Stevens believed that art creates its own world. But, he knew that, like the cider in the cider press, the products of the human imagination have to start with the real stuff of life. You can’t have cider without apples. You can’t have art without life.

Today we are joining many churches in the Anglican tradition that are returning to a way of observing the final Sundays of the church year—a time we used to call “Rogationtide”. Today and next Sunday we are celebrating the season of Creation, a time newly set apart in the spirit of Rogation Days to give thanks for the created world and to think reflectively about how we meet God in that created world and how we can be more faithful stewards of it. Today we celebrate the harvest. Next Sunday we celebrate the earth itself. Taken together, we hope, these Sundays will help ground us in our relationships to the world, our fellow creatures, and the source of our being. And they will help us claim our identity as God’s partners in the care of all creation.

So, remembering that “the real is only the base, but it is the base”, let’s think together about harvest time and what it says to us about who we are and who we are called to be. Our first reading today, from the Book of Deuteronomy [26: 1-11], recounts the way ancient Israelites observed their annual harvest festival. For the first generation of Israelites living in the Promised Land, the harvest festival celebrated both the particular harvest at hand and the larger history of God’s saving acts in delivering Israel from Egyptian slavery into Palestinian freedom. As he brought a symbolic harvest basket to the priest, this is part of what each householder said:

The Lord brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, with a terrifying display of power, and with signs and wonders; and he brought us into this place and gave us this land, a land flowing with milk and honey. So now I bring the first of the fruit of the ground that you, O Lord, have given me. [Deuteronomy 26]

In this harvest act of thanksgiving, the Israelites recited the story of what God had done for them as a prelude to offering a portion of those gifts symbolically for the altar. This is not unlike the way Native Americans thank the buffalo, the deer, the fish itself for the gift of the life they will consume. The ancient Israelites understood that, as much as hard human labor had contributed to the success of their harvest, its very abundance was due primarily to God for the original gift of the land and the mysterious processes of nature.

You and I live in an age that is less mystical about nature and its processes, and that’s a good thing. Science has helped us understand and improve our methods of farming, and the result has been a dramatic increase in the productivity of agriculture around the world. But that understanding has come with a price, and the spiritual cost has been high. We attribute our successes to our own cleverness rather than to the originating gift that makes those successes possible. We would no more think of thanking a buffalo, a deer, a fish for its life than we would slaughter a bull upon this altar. With our realism has come a functional disconnection from the source of our being, the source of life’s abundance, the fullness of the earth itself.

So the first thing to say about harvest is that, like cider from a cider press, the fruit of all our labors is the result in part but not entirely of our own effort. A good part—perhaps the bigger part—of the credit for that fruit belongs to God. Like Native Americans, the Israelites understood that the idea of a “level playing field”(a notion much abroad in our culture) is a fantasy. The world and its processes are originating gifts that we must always factor in to any accounting of how we do with what we have. We each and all should take our cue from Moses this morning and acknowledge that we’ve been given a leg up. As Emerson knew, there is no way to separate one’s own merit from the fullness of the originating gift. In his words, “The benefit overran the merit the first day, and has overran the merit ever since.” [Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Experience”]

It is important to remember that bread and wine, the two symbolic elements of the Christian Eucharistic meal, are both signs of divine abundance and products of human work. Jesus could have given us a meal of fruit and water, the raw materials of our diet, but instead he asked us to remember him with food and drink crafted by human labor from divine gifts. Like cider in its relation to apples, the symbolic elements of bread and wine say something to us about how God and we interact. You can’t have grapes, wheat, and water without God. You can’t have bread and wine without us. Who we are, what we do, matters not only to us but to God. Human work, human activity, human creativity, human compassion and love-- these human agencies are an important part of God’s redemptive processes. You can’t have creation without God. You can’t have a harvest without us.

And that brings us to today’s Gospel reading from Matthew [25: 14-30]. This is the familiar parable of the talents. In Jesus’s telling, the master departs giving the first man five talents, the second man two, and the third man one. Upon the master’s return, the first man brings in five more talents, the second man two more, and the third man fearfully returns the single talent he was given in the first place. There are a million different ways to read this parable. Some see it as a lesson in economics. Others see it as a story about the right use of our natural gifts. But I want us to think of it this morning as posing each of us a fairly simple question about our own participation in the fulfilling of God’s purposes.

The action in this story starts when the master, going on a journey, endows each person with some resources. The “talent” in this story is a Greek word originally meaning a sum of money. Our English meaning of the word—natural ability, inclination—comes from the figurative way this very parable was interpreted in Medieval Christian preaching. So in its origins this is a parable about the way each of us starts life’s race. Some of us start with five, some with two, some with only one. And one deep point of the parable, I think, is the way it says what the cider press and the bread and wine of communion are saying. Everything we have starts with God’s originating gift. But that gift cannot be perfected, completed; it cannot realize its own potential, without human labor and compassion and love.

As we gather around God’s table this morning, we do so trying to live into the fullness of the parable of the talents. Let us each come forward to be fed carrying the symbolic gifts that our readings from Matthew and Deuteronomy provide us. We can offer the produce of the season, the fruit of our works only because we collaborate with God in the perfection of God’s originating gifts. God has brought us to this place, delivered us from other lesser stories, into a new narrative of love and justice and abundant generosity and compassion for all. There can be no creation without God. There can be no harvest without us. The good news this morning is this: you cannot be you without God, and God cannot fully be God without you. That is the truth about God and us. God needs us, and we need God. Together we are about the work of perfecting ourselves and the world. The meal we eat and drink is a sign and symbol of the depth and blessing of that good news. Creation and harvest are two sides of one divine/human coin. We are grateful. And we matter. And the knowledge of that truth is, abundantly and wonderfully, enough. Amen.

The Rector's Monday Message: November 7, 2011

Blessed are the Debonair?

Sitting in the chapel of an Episcopal parish in New York City several years ago, I noticed that there were ten stained glass windows in the chapel, each depicting one of the Beatitudes [Matthew 5: 1-12]. As my eye moved along the row of windows, it stopped at the third, arrested in lexical surprise. Instead of the words, “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth” I found the phrase rendered, “Blessed are the debonair . . .” I was probably not the first pewsitter who snickered at the way a Park Avenue church had made Jesus sound like someone right out of the Social Register. Where else would you hear the New Testament equate meekness with savoir faire?

Knowing French a bit, I went home and looked up debonair in my Larousse. The preferred modern meaning of debonair in French is the one we’d expect, “d'une élégance nonchalante.” But there are older meanings of debonair that the French translators of the Bible must have had in mind. When Jesus says in our English Bible, “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth” it is rendered in French as, “Heureux les débonnaires, car ils hériteront la terre!” In this context, debonair means something like, “of good manner”. This doesn’t mean that the debonair/meek are fashion forward. It suggests that they are humble, gracious, self-effacing.

Yesterday we observed All Saints Day, the Christian holiday that celebrates the full extension of the communion of saints in space and time. In popular piety, All Saints Day has morphed into an occasion to remember the dead. In its origins, though, the festival is about the full continuum of Christian saints, one that includes the dead, the living, those yet to come and extends geographically as well to include all the imagined corners of the earth.

It has always moved me that the All Saints Day reading of scripture climaxes with these twelve verses from the fifth chapter of Matthew’s Gospel. The Beatitudes—the ten sayings of Jesus that begin the Sermon on the Mount—are in Matthew’s rendering a proclamation of the Good News paralleling God’s giving of the Law to Moses on Mount Sinai in the book of Exodus. These ten precepts tell us what characterizes the “blessed” (or in other translations, “happy”, “fortunate”) life. Those characteristics are, as Jesus always is, radically countercultural. The blessed/happy life exemplifies (among other things) poverty of spirit, meekness, mercy, peace. Contrary to what we customarily think, the fulfilled life is not one of self-promoting assertive independence. The happy/fortunate fulfilled life is marked by openness, compassion, and an awareness of one’s fragility.

Given my upbringing, it’s not a surprise that I love old movies. When I was a teenager, Channel 9 in Los Angeles showed Fred Astaire/Ginger Rogers movies every Sunday night, and I always used to stay up late watching them. As a bookish teenager, I was drawn to Fred Astaire as the absolute paragon of an elegance to which I aspired, as the epitome of what it means in our common parlance to be debonair, to be possessed of nonchalant elegance. Imagine my surprise when, in my late 20s, I was serving as the Bishop’s Chaplain in Los Angeles and saw Fred Astaire in the pews at an 8 a.m. service at All Saints, Beverly Hills. He was not singing or dancing or being in any way obvious. He was quietly sitting in a pew, faithfully saying the responses, quietly making his way through the liturgy. He entered and left without fanfare. In his deportment he was a model churchgoer—both receptive and involved—and an example of what it means to be debonair: not just meek but possessed of a good manner and humble spirit.

As we move forward from our All Saints Day observance, let’s strive to exemplify saintly qualities in our own lives. Being saintly doesn’t mean acting as if we have it all figured out. It means being meek, of good manner. It means seeing ourselves in solidarity and compassion with each other. It means acknowledging ourselves to be fragile, finite, beginners. It means being, in the best sense of the word, debonair.

Gary Hall

The Rector's Monday Message: October 31, 2011

What’s With All These Vampires and Zombies?

Today is Halloween, a holiday with several meanings. For Christians it’s the eve of All Saints Day; for young adults it’s an excuse for parties; for children it’s the funnest day of the year; for TV programmers it’s the time to schedule one more horror movie marathon.

Anyone who follows popular culture must be aware of the increasing number of vampire and zombie movies and television shows in recent years. For vampire fans, we have Twilight, The Vampire Diaries, and True Blood. For zombie aficionados, we have Death Valley, Dead Set, and Walking Dead. And for those who love the two types equally, there is the new show, Deadliest Warrior, which features face-to-face combat between both groups of the Undead.

Word has it that vampires are fading and zombies gaining the upper hand these days. However we understand their relative cultural power, though, it’s clear that this pervasive fixation on the Undead is saying something that we need to hear. Why do so many people in our world find that tales of vampires and zombies provide them meaningful parables of life and death?

Vampires come to us from medieval Eastern Europe, and it doesn’t take a genius to see how Balkan peasants would have made up stories about local nobility who were figuratively and literally bleeding them dry. Remember that Dracula is a nobleman, a count; he’s a representative of the elite who exacted blood and money from those who lived in fealty to them. In more modern accounts, vampires have morphed into scary monsters (the Dracula movies) and then into Romantic figures living beyond the grave.

Zombies derive from West African and Haitian varieties of Voodoo. Originally, zombies were those who had subjugated their will to a more powerful figure and existed thereafter to do that person’s bidding. In contemporary culture zombies have become emblems of the breakdown of civilization, traveling in hordes preying on the living and eventually turning the entire population into flesh-eating zombies. If the vampires were figurative predators, zombies were metaphorical prey. Either way, they projected images of power and its abuses.

However you think of vampires and zombies, their resurgence in the 21^st century suggests some pervasive cultural worries that should make us people of faith take note. While vampires may live beyond the grave, their ongoing existence doesn’t seem to resemble what Christians would understand as resurrection. That younger people find vampires to be symbols of everlasting love should signal to us that the young don’t know much about the Christian hope. And the kind of disintegration the zombies usher in feels like a parodic vision of Armageddon: in zombie land, the world ends in an orgy of mutual predatory destruction, but it does not usher in the City of God.

In the 1930’s horror movies spoke to a shared experience of economic devastation. In the 1950s they expressed anxiety about living in the nuclear age. In the 21^st century, the resurgence of vampire and zombie drama suggests another era of cultural dis-ease. Vampires live forever with romantic but without divine love. Zombies bring about social destruction that suggests judgment without redemption. Both visions tell us that many younger people experience the world as a predatory place. They see themselves hanging on in a world with little hope of joy or peace.

As Halloween modulates into All Saints’ Day, those of us who follow Jesus need to remember a couple of things. We should remember what the Christian hope really is. It’s a hope of resurrected life in Christ that redeems and transforms our lives and the world’s. We should proclaim that hope to a culture that confuses the vampire existence with eternal life. We should also remember that we share our world with people who increasingly find it a fearful and hostile place. What kind of a picture of God and human destiny are we in our witness showing to the world? What kind of comfort, care, and ministry are we providing for those who find life a frightening enterprise?

Vampires and zombies are abroad in our culture as signs of the pains and fears you and I as God’s loving agents should be attending to. They’re not just harmless monsters. They stand for what upcoming generations fear and dread the most. If we have eyes to see and ears to hear, we’ll let these creatures alert us to opportunities for love, service, and the proclamation of good news.

So much for my amateur cultural theoretics; take them for what they’re worth. Sometime I’ll share my thoughts (and strategies) on Angry Birds! Happy Halloween. And, more importantly, Happy All Saints’ Day.

Gary Hall

Homily: The Twentieth Sunday after Pentecost [October 30,2011] Christ Church Cranbrook

When I was Vicar of St. Aidan’s Church in Malibu, a generous parishioner gave us the gift of a new processional cross. Malibu has a 1950s modernist building, an architectural landmark in its own right but very different from this building, so the church furnishings there are very different there from the ones here at Christ Church. The processional cross was made of highly polished brass and it looked really good when lifted high by a muscular surfer acolyte, especially as it glinted in the sunlight and reflected the light off the ocean from across the Pacific Coast Highway.

One Sunday not long after we received that cross, I noticed an acolyte looking rather intently at the cross. For a minute, I thought he might be unusually pious for a teenager. Then I realized what he was doing. He wasn’t pondering the mystery of the cross at all. He was combing his hair, and admiring his own reflection in the cross as he did it.

Like all teenagers, this boy was obsessed with his appearance. He was not unusually narcissistic. He has, in fact, grown into a mature, faithful, compassionate adult. But I thought about his preening in the reflection of that cross as I thought about these words from our Gospel this morning. Among other things, Jesus says this about the hyper-religious people of his day, the ones Matthew’s Gospel calls scribes and Pharisees:

They do all their deeds to be seen by others; for they make their phylacteries broad and their fringes long. They love to have the place of honor at banquets and the best seats in the synagogues, and to be greeted with respect in the marketplaces, and to have people call them rabbi. [Matthew 23: 5-7]

All of us can smile knowingly when we see a teenage boy looking a bit too intently at his reflection in a mirror. But Jesus’s remarks about those who “do all their deeds to be seen by others” probably elicit a different kind of knowing grimace when we think about how we all behave as adults. I can’t speak for you, but when I look back on my own life I recall many times when my behavior has been dictated principally by how it would make me look to others. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to be authentically moral or generous or pious or compassionate. It’s more that I surely wanted you to see me as moral and generous and pious and compassionate.

Jesus’s critique of human moral pretension and hypocrisy often turns on our unwillingness to ask of ourselves what we demand from others. In today’s passage, though, Jesus turns our attention to a subtler and perhaps more dangerous form of human hypocrisy: the way in which we let what others think of us dictate how we will live our lives.

Of course, there is a good side to the social dimension of human behavior. We are social beings, and we learn to be fully human by habituating ourselves to the values espoused by our religious, civic, and political culture. Reputation—what the Greeks called klaos , the lasting fame whose pursuit drove the heroes of the Trojan War—has always been important in human affairs. We erect statues and monuments to those who we believe have lived exemplary lives. Each of us wants the story told about us to be a good one, especially when we’re gone.

But if we orient ourselves entirely to what others think about us, if we get all our moral and spiritual bearings from outside ourselves, then we never come fully into authentic living. Jesus’s point about the scribes and Pharisees was not that they were doing something wrong. His point was that they were doing something--perhaps something right--for no authentic, personal reason. They were obeying the law without having internalized the law’s values. They may have been technically following the law, but they were not organically living it.

Authentic human living—life lived on Jesus’s terms, and God’s—is respectful of opinion but is motivated from within. In the essay of his we all read when we were self-involved teenagers, “Self-Reliance”, Ralph Waldo Emerson says this: “Absolve you to yourself, and you shall have the suffrage of the world.” His point is that a truly good, loving, selfless, moral act does not need to be validated by society. Such an act is its own validation. And if you do such an act you do not need to appeal to an external authority for either forgiveness or permission. For Emerson, as for Jesus, the goal of human life was authentic living. One learns to live authentically by living from within.

To live from within does not mean that we do not attend to the values or standards of our culture or society. But living from within does mean that we take the time and do the work to articulate and live out the values and affirmations that are most deeply true for us. Emerson’s point is, essentially, Jesus’s point. If you have made the values of the Gospel your own and not somebody else’s, and if you can hold your actions to the standard of your own highest values, then you do not need to appeal to the world’s opinion to justify yourself. Mercy, forgiveness, healing, blessing, compassion: these are the core of what it means to be a human being on Jesus’s terms. As Jesus says elsewhere in Matthew’s Gospel, orienting yourself toward these values and away from the rules is not lawlessness. If anything, Jesus’s followers are called to a “higher righteousness” than are the rule scorecard keepers. “For I tell you, unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.” [Matthew 5:20]

To live from within does not mean to withdraw from the world. Again, we are social creatures, and we become who we are through extended interaction with each other. Neither you nor I came out of the womb fully formed as the people we are. We have come to be those people in relationship—collaboration, enmity, love, conflict—with each other. So living from within does not equate with rugged individualism. It’s neither “I Gotta Be Me” nor “I Did it My Way”. But living from within does mean doing the work to connect my own story with God’s big story, to take from the faith and the tradition and my engagement with others those truths that connect with my own experience and make them mine. I believe in compassion, forgiveness, blessing, and healing because I have both seen and experienced them in others’ lives and my own.

I believe in crucifixion, resurrection, and transfiguration because those biblical events have connection in my life and the life of the world I inhabit. I used to believe them because, as a Christian and a priest I thought I had to. I believe them now because I know they’re true. And I know they’re true because I’ve lived long enough, with Bible and Prayer Book in hand, to be able to make and understand the connections. And I’ve had a lot of help from others along the way.

Last Thursday, the psychologist and author James Hillman died. He was an interesting and provocative figure, if only because he wrote a book with one of my favorite titles: We’ve Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy—And the World’s Getting Worse. Hillman was famous for criticizing psychotherapy for the way it tended increasingly to pursue individual “personal growth” at the expense of a corresponding commitment to social justice and care for the world. He understood two things, both profoundly true. One is that we need to go inward. As he said, “There is a place for the strength of character and subtlety of insight that the investigation of interiority produces.” The other is that we need to go outward: “The plight of the world” has “certainly forced us to feel that we cannot go through the world for our own benefit and that we are actually destroying our souls by an attitude that pretends to save them.” [Both quotations, James Hillman and Michael Ventura, We’ve Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy—And the World’s Getting Worse p. 50, 51]

The scribes and Pharisees believed, as many in our world believe, that they could be righteous without being just and spiritual without being compassionate. They believed they could achieve personal purity in a broken world. What Jesus taught us, and what we come to know internally as we gather around his table, is that such a bargain is impossible.

We live from within so that we will not be dependent on someone else’s truth to be the guiding principle of our lives. If it is faithful, that inward living calls us out into a world whose brokenness is as much a part of us as our own most deeply personal story is. The world is not an obstacle to our salvation. It is the location where that saving journey happens. As we free ourselves from our need to have the reputation of being faithful, and as we make God’s truths our own, our inner and our outer lives will begin to resemble each other, and the more we look in the mirror—whether in the processional cross or in the bathroom--the more we will begin to see the face of Jesus reflected back. Amen.